


The Sand Reckoner

by Prochytes



Category: Being Human, Being Human (UK)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-31
Updated: 2012-03-31
Packaged: 2017-11-02 19:24:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/372519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prochytes/pseuds/Prochytes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Old Ones do cast a reflection. It’s just that the mirror is too big to see.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sand Reckoner

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the Season Four finale. Originally posted on LJ in 2012.

The mustard is a crooked yellow smirk across the red and white check of the tablecloth. At the far end, it flattens out into a smear. The smear dries Hal’s mouth and sweats his palms. The spillage in itself is bad enough. But the smear means there has been _contact_. Transfer. Mess on the run.

 

“Well, I never did.” Pearl nudges him, unresistant, out of the way. “What a sight! How did this happen? It’s not like you to knock things over, Hal.”

 

“I... I don’t know. There was a... I just....”

 

“Never mind.” Pearl plies a wet tea-towel with gusto. “No use crying over spilt milk, eh?”

 

Hal does not speak. The mustard leers. Two hundred and forty-six. The man who forgets nothing – not a scuff, not a smear, not a blot – knows solitary confinement in an endless present. Hal watches Leo die, and Annie cradle a presumptive saviour, and Hal is lapping Alex’s lifeblood from the floor of that foetid basement as maggots caress his chin, and the mustard stains the red and white of the tablecloth behind him, and it is leering. 

 

***

 

“What are you reading?”

 

“A novel, Tom. Apuleius.”

 

“Oh.” There will follow a pause of just under a second before... “wassat, then?”

 

Hal sighs, and rubs his forehead. “I have reached the story of Cupid and Psyche.”

 

“Good, is it?”

 

“A spiteful goddess has placed before the heroine a great heap of wheat, and barley, and poppy seeds, the grains of which the girl must sort into their several kinds by nightfall.”

 

“Right.” Tom ponders for a moment, before breaking into a grin. “That goddess was lucky she never ran into you, then. Happy as Larry, a job like that would make you.”

 

Hal wonders when the boy grew so perceptive.  He goes on rubbing his forehead. The motion kneads away the mustard, and the chip in Pearl’s sugar-bowl in 1974, but not two hundred and forty-six.

 

***

 

The Order of St. Dionysius follows a vow of silence. Their religion is a problem, of course, but the Abbot is an admirer of Origen, and supports Hal in his efforts to stay clean. For the decade Hal has resided here, he has been happy to assign Hal the small, exacting duties that keep him calm.

 

When Hal returns that day from fetching firewood, he guesses what has happened. There is the silence of “won’t”, and there is the silence of “can’t”. The halls of the abbey have slipped from one to the other. Hal knows whom he will find in the Abbot’s chair.

 

“Hello, Hal.” Mr. Snow steeples his fingers. On the table before him is a pile of seeds. “I haven’t seen you since 1793. These... oscillations of yours grow rather trying.”

 

Hal moistens his lips. “I won’t come back. It doesn’t matter how many people you kill. I’ll reach a place where the world can’t find me.”

 

“The world will always find you, Hal. Do you know why that must be?”

 

Hal’s eyes flicker between the table and Mr. Snow’s face. 

 

“I passed through Mesopotamia, coming here. There was a village; I felt the need for an _amuse-bouche_. The headman confronted me. Do you know what he did, Hal? He threw down a handful of dust between us.”

 

Mr. Snow lounges back in the chair.

 

“I split him open like a pomegranate, of course. What care I for dust who knew those motes when they were Nineveh? But the point of this story is what that ignorant peasant _thought_ I would do. He thought that I would stop to count them. How many seeds, Hal?”

 

“What?”

 

“How many seeds on the table before me? I know that _you_ have already numbered them.”

 

Hal winces, and spits it out: “Two hundred and forty-six.” 

 

“Do you see? They think they know the vampire, when all they know is you. That is what it means to be an Old One. Who needs a mirror when the world is one’s reflection? They will always find you, Hal.”

 

Mr. Snow smiles his blackened smile. 

 

“Count on it.”

 

FINIS

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hal reprises Apuleius Metamorphoses 6.10.


End file.
